Dubrovnik, Croatia
Europe’s data center markets need more energy. Demand for energy to power the data centers is projected to grow from 10 gigawatts in 2024 to 35 gigawatts by 2030. The only place on the Continent with the power and political will to meet that demand is one most people haven’t thought of—and the war in the Gulf has reinforced the urgency to secure artificial-intelligence infrastructure for the U.S. and our allies.
With Iran threatening “complete and utter annihilation” of data centers in Abu Dhabi and calling American tech companies legitimate military targets, the question is no longer whether the West should rethink where to build its crucial AI infrastructure, such as data centers. The question is where they should go.
Croatia is geographically removed from every active conflict zone. As part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the Schengen Area and the eurozone, Croatia delivers regulatory predictability and political durability that institutional capital requires. A data center in Croatia is infrastructure protected by our sacrosanct collective defense guarantee.
Croatia’s grid is among the cleanest in Europe: Renewables supplied more than 52% of all electricity consumed in 2025, with a further 15% from nuclear. Electricity prices run significantly below the European average. The climate and access to natural water resources provide thermal management advantages that reduce energy consumption and operating costs, alongside high-voltage grid capacity that congested Western European hubs can’t offer.
European digital infrastructure investment is projected to reach €100 billion by 2030. EU data sovereignty rules are compelling major U.S. technology companies to store European data within EU borders—creating demand for U.S.-owned, EU-based capacity that doesn’t yet exist.
I have spent my career betting on overlooked infrastructure. The underlying logic is always the same: Find the structural gap, understand why it exists, and build first.
This is why I am in Croatia to announce Project Pantheon: a next-generation 1-gigawatt data-center campus on 310 acres. The campus will host 800 megawatts of usable IT load—enough to power the city of Baltimore. The facility is designed to be more resilient than most data centers in operation today, reaching 99.99999% uptime just as hyperscalers need facilities that can run massive workloads continuously and draw huge amounts of power without interruption.
Croatia sits between key areas of the EU, opening corridors to regions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Greece and Turkey. Pantheon Atlas LLC’s total initial investment in the project is $13.5 billion with the potential to grow to beyond $50 billion.
This is the largest single private investment in Croatian history. No U.S.-led gigawatt-scale AI-optimized facility currently exists in Central or Eastern Europe. Pantheon will be accessible to European defense, intelligence and commercial users, thereby helping the EU reach its goal of tripling European data center capacity within five to seven years.
The war in the Gulf has revealed that concentrating AI infrastructure in jurisdictions where a single strike can take a $30 billion investment offline is a strategic liability. Croatia offers the advantage of a collective defense guarantee that no insurance premium can match.
Mr. Rich is managing partner of Pantheon AI and founder of 24 Ventures, a venture firm headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y.